Review: Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell

A few things to know about Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell by Jacques Tardi:

1. It's set in the early '70s, but it was published in French in 2011, and just published in English by Fantagraphics this month. 
2. Although using panels from the inside to decorate the front cover, back cover and frontispiece is great graphic design, do your best not to read any of them, or else they may give too much away. 
3. Tardi's style for drawing people may look cartoony, but they're grounded in reality, and this is a hard-boiled, messed-up noir story.

Jean-Patrick Manchette was France's Raymond Chandler. In '72 he wrote Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell. As a result, this adaptation contains effortless little (and sometimes regrettable) markers of the period that might be hard to recreate deliberately. Manchette's lean works are full of trenchant criticism of France's society, and his stories follow characters that most of his readers had forgotten about: the poor, the disenfranchised and the crazy.

Tardi, following Manchette's lead, takes the characters at face value. We follow along inside the mind of a practiced killer, or a neurotic and disaffected woman, without apology or self-consciousness. Once you get used to the drawing style, the characters are as blunt and stark as in any crime movie.

(That drawing style is Tardi's version of the French ligne claire ("clear line") style, which puts simply-drawn figures in detailed backgrounds, using realistic props. The line has a uniform weight, and there's generally no hatching or shading, just flat black areas. Hergé pioneered and perfected the style with Tintin.)

Sometimes, the narration's terseness left me confused: A couple of the scene transitions were hard for me to notice, since there's no inflection between one third-person narrator and another.

Without giving away anything about the plot, I'll just say that things really get nuts. Before long, the story picks up the momentum of a runaway train. You can read the whole story in one feverish night (like I did). The violence is sudden, brutal and cathartic.

At the end, you're left with characters who are compromised, with outsiders still on the outside, and with a really weird take on innocence.

Review: O HUMAN STAR

I'd never heard of O Human Star until yesterday, and I notice that its first Kickstarter was already funded this past fall, so maybe this review will be old news to some of you. But to those who haven't discovered this interesting treat before now:

O Human Star by Blue Delliquanti is a long-form, ongoing story available once a week (five times a month, to be precise) at www.ohumanstar.com. It's a science fiction story wrapped around a three-character family drama, grappling with compelling questions of identity.

The story starts with Alastair Sterling, the father of the robotics revolution, dying and then waking up years later in a synthetic body that mimics his own in every detail. Who preserved his memories and installed them in this body is a mystery that drives Al to find his old partner. Things take off from there.

The book is drawn in an economical style that is cartoony enough to portray the characters' emotions, but detailed enough to show off science-fiction gadgets when the story needs them. The character designs show clearly-defined individuals with rich emotional expressions. (Even the robots look charming: a short valet robot, Gimel, has a face consisting only of a rectangle with two small circles for eyes, but manages to show eagerness as well as dutiful attendance.) As the story jumps back and forth in time, the characters age realistically. They also are clearly of several different ethnicities and backgrounds, which Delliquanti evokes well, in about as few lines as necessary. I've seen much more detailed superhero cartoonists (e.g., the team of Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary) who couldn't draw a consistent southeast-Asian face from one panel to the next (e.g., the Wasp in The Ultimates -- is she Vietnamese? Korean? Anglo? depends on the panel!).

Sometimes, a simple drawing style without lots of detail is a crutch for a lazy artist. I was initially afraid of that here, but the lines on the page effectively show a rich, complex world and its varied inhabitants. Then they get out of the way of the character interactions. Delliquanti's hub site (www.bluedelliquanti.com) shows other comics with other, sometimes more detailed styles, like the war-journalism comic she's drawing, "War is Boring."

Delliquanti's writing is engaging and subtle, and, like in the best comics (most expertly, Jaime Hernandez's stories in Love and Rockets), much of it is conveyed without words. The characters' faces and stances show conflicted emotions and buried pain struggling to the surface. The few, brief dream sequences go by without heavy-handed explanation. In any science-fiction story, exposition is a necessary evil, but Delliquanti limns her world in a few deft strokes, in story as well as in art. (It helps that the main character wakes up abruptly in this world and needs to be introduced to it along with us.) The author carries us along confidently from the very beginning, always appearing sure of where she wants to go.

There are thorny questions of identity swirling through the book: Is it harder for a robot to pass as a girl or as a human being? If a woman's prosthetic robotic legs are convincing enough, are they her "real" legs? Is a man gay if he only ever falls in love with one other man? How many genders can there be, and then what if people come in "organic" and "synthetic" varieties? Delliquanti explores the issues by presenting us with characters and situations we can empathize with, never becoming didactic.

The book is told in two very simple color schemes: blue tones over black lines for present-day sequences, and red tones over black lines for flashbacks. This works well with the simple line art. A few key things in the story get a more complex color treatment, again with a light touch that almost subliminally suggests their fraught significance. I've seen a few isolated drawings in color on the Kickstarter page, which tell me a few other things (like that two of the main characters have red hair), but mostly it's not needed.

Cartoonists looking to find an audience could learn a few things from Delliquanti's presentation: For example, in her Patreon page, she talks about how we can enable her to create comics that we will enjoy. It's not about her getting something off her chest; it's about us, the audience. I always appreciate that. Also, her drawing and writing styles are consistent from the beginning of the book, showing that she did a lot of prep work that we don't see; she's not figuring things out as she goes. I know that I (and probably a lot of us creators) are impatient to get our stuff out there, and to find our audience, but it shows more respect for that audience when we put something out only when it's ready. I do wish that her online store were updated, making it easier to find and buy hard copies of the book now that the Kickstarter is over, but I expect that will come in time.

The website dumps you at the latest page, so if you're just starting to read it, skip to the bottom of the page and click the "<<" button to get to the very beginning. I could wish for a more convenient "Start Here" button. Despite that, there are other things that I like about the website -- basic things, like that the author bought a domain name that is devoted to the comic, which allows access to the author's main site but puts it in the background. Also, although there are navigation buttons at the bottom (first, back, next, latest), clicking anywhere on a page will advance you to the next page -- hard to give readers a bigger, more convenient button than that. As is common on webcomics, there is an extensive comment-and-reply section below each page. I like being able to interact with authors this way, and it's always interesting to see just how much discussion a single page can generate. As a creator, this is a real treat, since it took a lot more time and work to make that single page than it took to read it, so it can be nice to dwell on it with readers.

I'm constantly astounded by how many talented, disciplined, hard-working cartoonists are out there, and the great work that we can find if we look. Blue Delliquanti and O Human Star are one great example. I hope she posts a lot more of it.

Local Online Review Mag to change format

The new issue is of GutterGeek up, with the following reviews:

Captain America	Fables	House of Mystery	Jamilti
Logicomix	My Brain is Hanging Upside Down	Superman

However, change is afoot, according to their blog, 

After three years as a semi-regular review journal, we are going to be morphing over the course of 2009. The biggest change will be a move from publishing complete “issues” to embracing some of the more natural rhythms of electronic publishing by publishing reviews, articles and other features as they arrive.

So, subscribe to their gutterblog feed (http://guttergeek.com/news/files/blog.xml) and stay up-to-date!

Essential Dykes To Watch Out For Reviewed by American Prospect On-Line

In a post back in '07, I expressed surprise that the liberal political journal The American Prospect would actually devote its cover story to an article on super-hero comics. Alison Bechdel's "Dykes To Watch Out For", on the other hand, seems a more natural fit. Sure enough, a review of the new hardcover collection, The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For, was posted on the mag's web-site yesterday.

The Ten Cent Plague

The heart of David Hajdu’s The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America is the story of Janice Valleau Winkleman. We first meet her, in the book’s prologue, living with her husband Ed in a Florida retirement village. But this retiree harbors a secret past that not even her children were aware of: She once made her living drawing comic books. Hers is one of over 800 names listed in the book’s appendix of people who were driven from the medium forever by the backlash against comic books that culminated in the 1954 Senate subcommittee hearings on Juvenile Delinquency and the subsequent adoption by the industry of the draconian Comics Code,the most restrictive set of content restrictions ever enforced on any medium, which drove many publishers, most notably EC Comics, to abandon the field. Throughout the narrative, Hajdu returns to Winkleman’s story, tracing her career from her first job at MLJ Comics (known as Archie Comics these days), obtained at age 19 through connections at the art school she attended, to her final, reluctant, decision more than a decade later to walk away from the industry for good. Though she eventually took up painting as a hobby, Winkleman would never again attempt to make a living as an artist, in comics or anywhere else. When asked why, she responds, “I was scared to death. Don’t you know what they did to us?” Hajdu does indeed know, and in the remainder of this unforgettable book, he lets us know as well.

To be honest, and this isn’t a criticism but merely a caveat, the book doesn’t really live up to its subtitle. This isn’t really a story of how the backlash against comic books changed America, but of how that backlash was an extreme and tragic example of the changes that swept all aspects of American culture and society at the midpoint of the 20th century. The book’s greatest strength is Hajdu’s ability to convey his sweeping social history in starkly human terms. His focus is squarely on the people, from industry giants such as Spirit creator Will Eisner and William Gaines, publisher of EC Comics and a central figure in the controversy, to those like Winkleman, who toiled in relative or even complete obscurity, not even allowed, in most cases, to sign their name to their work, whose lifes were forever altered by the events he details. He also provides insight into the characters and motivations of those who fueled the backlash against comics. These instigators include the infamous Dr. Frederick Wertham, whose sensationalistic book of spurious pseudo-pyschology, Seduction Of The Innocent, provided much of the grist for the anti-comics mill of the Senate subcommitte and other comics detractors, and the ambitious Senator Estes Kefauver, who hoped to use the publicity generated by these hearings to jumpstart his bid for the White House. Aiding them at the grassroots level were the mostly well intentioned, if ultimately misguided, community and religious leaders who took their protests to the extreme of organizing mass burnings of comic books in mostly small towns across the nation, and the children, members of what at the time was the intended audience for comic books, who aided them, sometimes reluctantly and with regret but surprisingly often willingly and with relish, in their crusade by gathering up comic books to fuel the funeral pyres and applying pressure on local merchants, often in the form of a threatened boycott, to stop selling them.

Through striving, and succeeding, to put a human face on this tragic yet, outside of the community of comics professionals and dedicated fans, nearly forgotten episode from our recent history, Hajdu has produced not only one of the most important books of comics and social history yet published, but he has crafted a page turner of a story as involving and compellingly readable as Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize winning novel covering the same historical period, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, to which I would heartily recommend The Ten Cent Plague as a companion volume.

October's guttergeek Online

I just received an email announcing that the newest guttergeek review e-journal is available online.

What's guttergeek?

I'll let Jared Gardner, editor of guttergeek, explain:

"We are standing on the brink of a creative renaissance no less vital and exciting than those which overtook New England in the 1840s or Harlem in the 1920s. But before we can fully begin to measure the dimensions of that renaissance in the graphic narrative, we must first clear a space in which we can talk about these works free from superlatives, hero-worship and defensive over-exuberance. guttergeek seeks to open one such space where graphic narratives can be discussed honestly—independent of the culture of celebrity or the cult of hagiography that tends to gather around the most middling comics creator.”

Check out the below reviews found in the latest issue of guttergeek and see what's being discussed there.

Abandoned Cars	Anthology of Graphic Fiction Vol 2	Baobab	Bluesman
Bourbon Island & Gus	Low Moon	Marvel Illustrated	Mr. Spic Goes to Washington
Motion Comics	Particular Panels: Superwest	Shake Girl	Too Cool to be Forgotten

The Politics of Slugfests

I am quite often surprised by the venues in which I will encounter stories on comics and graphic novels. I certainly never would have expected the self-styled journal of "liberal intelligence," The American Prospect to feature as its cover story a report on current trends in super-hero comics, complete with a blow up of a panel from Warren Ellis' Black Summer.

The article by Julian Sanchez examines recent attempts, in stories that directly or indirectly criticize the Bush administration, from Black Summer to Marvel's Civil War, to mix progressive politics and super-heroes. It is Sanchez's conclusion that, while well intended, these super powered political allegories ultimately fail because of what he sees as the conservative--he goes so far at one point as to use the word "fascist"-tendencies inherent in the nature of the super-hero genre itself.

Sanchez cites Civil War as "...the clearest example..." of his thesis: "The Superhero Registration Act," he writes,"is a straightforward analogue of the USA PATRIOT Act; the rhetoric of its opponents could have been cribbed from an ACLU brief. But under scrutiny, their civil libertarian arguments turn out to hold very little water in the fictional context. The 'liberty' the act infringes is the right of well-meaning masked vigilantes...to operate unaccountably, outside the law--a right no sane society recognizes."

Sanchez, in my view, has a valid point. Super-heroes have always been defenders of the establishment and the status quo, and political allegories in the genre have always worked better when the so-called heroes become the oppressors rather than the freedom fighters.

Stuff Ray Is Reading

I have just begun to read "Schulz and Peanuts", David Michaelis' new biography of Charles Monroe Schulz. I'll have a full review once I've finished. In the meantime, if you'd like to read more about the book, check out the following articles and reviews:

-from Publisher's Weekly

-John Updike reviews the book in The New Yorker

-and then there's this item from Yahoo! News.

I've also been reading Cerebus...unfortunately I've stalled while waiting for the one copy of Minds that the Columbus library owns to be returned and delivered to the Whetstone branch for me to check out. It's probably a good thing, though, as I could use a break after slogging through the purple prose and bitter ranting that make up the text portions of Reads.

I've also just read the first three trade collections of DC's year long weekly series 52. Even as someone who has read superhero comics all his life, I am stunned by the level of violence and gore in this series, especially in the scenes involving Shazam! villain Black Adam. (He literally rips a man in half--and not off-panel-- in the third issue.)

On the positive side, I'm intrigued by the return, in Vol 3, of the "Yellow Aliens" who created Animal Man and eager to see where that plotline, obviously the brainchild of co-writer (one of four) Grant Morrison, will go.

With all due respect

Here’s a nice little write-up over at the Panel Blog from Tony Goins regarding his trip to our recent gallery show and what he found there. Regarding the “Sunday Comix Jam Book, he had this to say

They collected a bunch of jam pages into a minicomic, which they were thoughtfully giving away for free. Good stuff (although there were a surprising number of jokes about Max, suicide, or some combination.)

Nice guy, that Tony. Very respectful.